A known card-receiving connector has a lateral arrangement of signal pin terminals mounted in its insulating housing and a grounding shield or grounding terminal arranged generally parallel to the signal pin terminals. The signal pin terminals are adapted to mate with receptacle terminals arranged along a lateral edge of a mating card, and the grounding shield is adapted to engage the outer conductive panel of the card. The card connector may have a single arrangement or port of signal pin terminals for mating to a single card, or it may have two or more arrangements or ports of signal pin terminals arranged vertically above one another for receiving two or more cards. Some card connectors also include card-ejection mechanisms provided along a longitudinal side thereof.
The grounding shield of a card connector must be connected to the ground circuit of a circuit board on which the card connector is mounted. As, is well-known in the prior art a single port card connector typically has a grounding shield extending rearwardly and covering the rear tails of the signal pin terminals, and the grounding shield has grounding tails extending therefrom adapted to be connected to the ground circuit of the underlying circuit board.
A card connector having two or more ports of signal terminals ("dual or multi-port" card connectors)and which includes two or more grounding shields cannot make a simple grounding connection inasmuch as the grounding shields must connector to each other and to the ground circuit of the printed circuit board. Known dual port card connectors include a relay substrate attached to a rear side of the connector. The signal pin terminals and the tails of the grounding shields are connected to conductors of the relay substrate and the relay substrate is electrically connected to the circuit board by way of an edge connector or other board-to-board connector, thereby making the required connection between the grounding shield of the card connector and the ground circuit of the circuit board.
The above-described connection between the grounding shield of the card connector and the ground circuit of the circuit board prevents the down-sizing of a card-receiving connector, particularly the reduction of the longitudinal size of the card connector, due to the presence of the grounding shield extending rearwardly over the rear tails of the pin terminals and the relatively bulky relay substrate attached to the insulating housing. Furthermore, use of the relay substrate increases the number of parts in the card connector, and accordingly increases the cost of the connector.